Step One Hundred: Light Gas
Sometimes, it’s really hard to get into a book. The story just isn’t grabbing your attention, you’re not in the mood for a mystery that day, or maybe your mind is just too busy to read and focus. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to get into a book on a particular day, and I just couldn’t do it. The Bible can feel like that a lot of times, but the good news for us is that the Bible has a section for every attention span. Got a five-second attention span? No problem! Read a Proverb. Looking at the Bible like any other book can be problematic, though. How many times have you picked up an instruction manual, read just the end, and tried to operate the machinery to no avail? You don’t know any of the rules for good and safe operation, you don’t know that you’re supposed to let the machine cool off when it gets too hot, and you don’t know what it’s even supposed to be used for! Failed attempts to shave the family dog with a chainsaw are usually a result of only reading the end of the instructions.
This is the problem we run into with the Bible. Sure, it’s a book we can pick up, turn to any part, and start reading, and we’ll still get something out of it, but there are basic things we have to cover before we can start trying to apply it. We have to lay the foundation, as it says in 1 Corinthians. A computer has many cool features, but first, we have to figure out how to hook everything up. We can’t use those features properly until we have everything connected. The Bible is an instruction manual for a good life, and if we jump in at the end thinking we’ll be able to understand everything, we make a terrible error. We build everything based on what the finished picture looks like, and we miss vital internal components that make the robot actually run. At first glance, everything looks great, but nothing actually functions the way it’s supposed to.
When we start reading the Bible from the beginning, we find out how God’s plan really got started. We see man’s failed attempts to create a society without God, and we see man attempting to worship God the way they feel is the best way (Spoiler alert, it doesn’t end well). We get warning after warning about pitfalls to look out for, and we get prophecies that all point to the end of the story and the story’s main character. More than this, we get vital instructions for how to operate our lives¹, recharge them by connecting with our power source², and cool them off when they get overheated³. God put everything there for a reason, and the more we read and study our Bible, the more we can see why He put the rules in that He put.
God loves us, and as our Creator, He wants what is best for us. He designed our lives in a specific way, and He gave us instructions on operations that must be followed for optimal use. When we start with the New Testament and try to work backward with that understanding from there, we find precisely what modern Christianity believes. A cruel and hateful God had His law replaced by the law of a loving Son. Jesus doesn’t have any requirements of us because He nailed them to the cross, and now we are under some undefinable “Law of Christ” and “Law of Love.” Things just don’t make sense. God created man, and out of what, spite, I suppose? He gave them laws, arbitrary laws with no purpose, and required them to keep them or be damned forever. Then, four thousand years later, He sends His Son (why, if He is so cruel?) to give His life so that those who repent may have eternal life. No more rules for them! Well, wait a minute. What about all those before Christ who received condemnation for breaking the law? Are their sentences removed because Christ removed the law? Something doesn’t make sense here.
If we start in the beginning, though, and go forward from there, we have a bit different story. We have the story of a loving God who created man in His own image, a God who became Christ, in fact⁴. This God created man with free will, free moral agency, and an intelligent mind. He set up specific times throughout the year that He wanted to meet with His beloved creation, and He even set up a weekly meeting as His last act of creation and called it very good. He gave man a beautiful garden to tend, and a beautiful wife to keep him company, but something was still not right. Where was the free will? If there was no law, there was no choice, and thus no true free will, only a facade. So, what does God do? He sets up a tree and a law. “Don’t eat from this tree!” He commands. He does this knowing that man will probably choose not to obey Him at some point in their lives (that’s the hazard of free will, after all). So He sets up a universal law that sin can redeemed by the blood of a God, and the crucifixion story is set in motion. Finally! Everything was perfect! Of course, we know that man did not choose God. They rejected His word for the word of a liar, Satan the Devil, and God had to come to die for our sins. That’s free will, the ability to choose between two things for yourself. Even today, we have this choice, this free will to choose between God or Satan.
As we go forward in time from creation, we see the evidence of the law running behind the scenes. Wrong form of worship is not accepted, there are appointed times, murder is punished, and there are animals created for food and those that aren’t. Abraham was called the guardian of the law, and likewise, his descendants were called the guardians of the law as well⁵. By the time we get to the story of the Israelites, we have a fairly clear picture of what is going on. God’s law existed long before the Israelites came around, but because of Abraham’s covenant and faithfulness to God, they were given the honor of guarding and preserving the law. More than that, they were given the honor of sharing the law and modeling it for the nations around them⁶. We see the one who created the world giving the law, and down through the Old Testament, we see the law passed down as good and pleasant. We gather from this that God’s law is from creation rather than something that came in just for the Israelites.
This is the foundation we go into the New Testament with. This is our background, and when we see Christ talking about the law, we see no contradictions; rather, it reaffirms the law⁷. Going into the rest of the New Testament, we have our foundation of truth, a foundation we know will not change. With the strong foundation we have and the foundation that Paul himself had, not to mention the rest of the disciples, we can read what they say in the light of the Old Testament, because that is the foundation they wrote upon and from. If the writers of the New Testament truly wrote that the law was gone, then they contradicted themselves, Christ, and the Old Testament, which makes them heretics. Careful reading shows that they not only did not teach that the law was done away with, but they affirmed the law.
We can’t read the Bible starting with our foundation in Paul and build a strong structure because Paul himself built upon the instructions found in the Old Testament. We’ve got to start with the beginning and go forward from there, keeping our instructions in mind. This is exactly what Paul was getting at in one place. Going through the Old Testament, we clearly see the futility of law without grace and the necessity for a savior. The Old Testament demonstrates the need for a combination of grace and law and then leads us forward to Christ. Before we can ever receive grace, we have to recognize the need for it. The only reason there is a need for grace is because we have sinned. Sin is the transgression of the law, which means that to know we have sinned and what our sins are, we need to know the law.
"Grace is life where we deserve death through forgiveness and blotting out of our sins. If sin exists, then law must also exist because sin is the transgression of the law. Therefore, if there is grace, there must also exist law." --- The First Law of Grace
Once we have read the law, we clearly see our sins and the absolute necessity for grace. We see the pitiful creatures we genuinely are, entirely laid bare by the law. We see the way we are to love, and we see ourselves full of hate. We see the way we ought to worship God, and we know we have been worshipping Satan. There can be no hope for us but the renewal of our hearts and minds through spiritual circumcision, which is baptism, and repentance and forgiveness by God. This is the grace of His Son, Jesus Christ, which is why Paul said the law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. Once we receive grace, we are no longer under the burden of the law; that is, we are no longer on death row, which is the burden of the law. The law does not cease to exist, and we would be fools to ignore the teaching of our schoolmaster who led us to Christ. The one who keeps the law will have life by it⁸.
Ignoring the Old Testament and the laws kept there ignores a very vital part of the foundation of our faith. The New Testament sheds more light on the Old Testament, but we cannot fully understand the New Testament unless we go forward from the Old. God set things out in order for a reason. Our instruction manual has vital directions that we cannot miss if we want to be able to live a godly life. If we start with step one hundred, light gas, we are going to get singed.
¹ The Ten Commandments, food laws, societal laws, etc.
⁸ Galatians 3:24
© Kyle Bacher 2023
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